Transmission - Omneon

Even though we have been talking with Timeline about the possibility of getting an EVS from them to deal with playout I still felt that it would be use3ful to get the Omneon up and running as a backup. I connected the director to two media ports via firewire and then powered up the store. At this point I realised that I didn’t have the connector between the fibre channel connections on the Director and the 9 pin D-type connections on the store. After a fruitless search for this cable I emailed Omneon support using a link on their website.
 

 N-Store

Simon from Omneon support got back to me on the same day and has been incredibly useful helping to identify our system as a D1 (Director) with an NStore (Storage). However he also stated that “This is a very old unsupported system”, no surprises there, but it appeared that all we were missing was the connection cable which is hopefully being sent through as I write this.

 Director

Although we may not use the Omneon on the day we will certainly get the system up and running and ingest content onto it just to make sure that it still works. At the end of the day the EVS will have to be returned and while it is a viable work around I think we still need to be looking at re-integrating the Omneon with the Pharos control platform in the long term. Maybe this could be done next year as a side project integrating it with the mobile presentation racks.
 

Fibre Channel Connections

Transmission - Bug Burners

Over the past few weeks I have been involved in several smaller projects that I just haven't had the time to blog but I'll try and do all that in the next few days.

The first is the bug burners. After messing around with these a few weeks ago Jamie and I managed to get one Probel bug-burner keying and filling the old logo correctly while another one appeared to have troubles with it's SDI i/p and so we had to use it to generate the bug and then use a Microvideo bug-burner to key and fill (this was the only solution at the time because we couldn't figure out whether or not the Microvideos' had a way to store the image to be keyed).

I was still not happy with this situation so  couple of weeks ago I went back to the bug-burners and had another look. This started with a repeat of the original test which again proved that Channel 2's bug-burner wasn't working, so I disassembled the casing to take a look at the different cards inside. James Uren and I were able to isolate the fault down to the SDI i/p card, which was different on each bug-burner. After testing voltages over the card we began to further cut down the peripherals to a small pot on the card. Adjusting this proved to be the key as the background signal began to appear, I will openly admit however that we are still not sure what exactly this pot is for, we believe it to be some kind of i/p timing adjustment which would make sense.

After doing this I then began looking at how to get our new bugs being generated and keyed. I had previously been told that I would need to use the Mirada Animation tool on the Router PC to generate a different file-type (.oxt) but after several attempts at doing this and ending up with files that were far to large to fit on a floppy disk (1.44MB) I began looking for a user manual to see what I really needed.

As it happens the bug-burners will take TARGA (.tag) files, this can be either stored as a key or an image and must be named accordingly (imag.tga, key.tga). I got branding to create a white bug, correctly positioned on a 720 x 576pix black background which I then renamed as imag.tga and uploaded to the bug-burners. Thankfully it worked and the bug was keyed over the video, this can then be readjusted in terms of positioning and transparency but the basic idea was that it was working. The only problem now is that this bug has serious amounts of aliasing on it, which of course won't pass QC, that's another problem for another day though because at least the system is working!

Transmission - Bug Burners

Last week Jamie (Head of TX) and I spent the morning trying to find ways in which to get the bug burners to work. Using the bug files from last year we each started work on an individual channel to see who could find the most efficient way of doing this. There was further complexity in the fact that the bug-burners had been wired in a very strange way last year as they were also used to insert GPI's for the WSS inserters. 

After trying many different attempts we finally figured out that one of the bug-burners didn't want to store the file on its internal storage, so we took a step back and used a spare burner to store and generate the key image which would then be passed into the original burner which would also fill the key. 

Luckily the other bug-burner was working fine and was able to both key and fill the image by itself. 

More information about the rest of the weeks tasks can be found on Jamies blog.

 

Pres 1 Standalone Bug/Keyer

 

  Pres 2 Bug Generator

Pres 2 Keyer

 Pres 2 Output

Engineering - Update

Seeing as all the engineering departments are now moving into TV systems to do their work we decided to have a massive tidy up. Not the most exciting of jobs but something that needed to be done none the less! We began by sorting through the piles of equipment and sorting it into different groups, transmission, audio, video etc. Then we created separate areas for all of these so that we would know where everything was when we needed to get to it.

Then we had the daunting task of sorting through and recoiling the cabling that was all over the floor, however with all of us helping out it didn't take that long before we had loads of need piles of video and audio cabling. 

After moving a few of the defunct racks about and re-positioning them at the back of TV Systems we then had a space in which we could place our newly created TX, OB and Interactive racks.

The last thing to do was to install a couple of internet connected PC's at the back of the room, a mega sound system and place a few tools here and there. As an afterthought we also obtained a white board and some engineeringesque posters to brighten the place up. TV Systems has now been affectionately been dubbed the "engineering office" and hopefully we'll be able to get a fair amount of Rave Live stuff done!

Transmission - Racking the Equipment

We have finally managed to find and sort out some half height mobile racks that we think will be suitable for the TX, Distribution and Presentation areas on the day of the event. Jamie has been busy drawing up system diagrams and working out what pieces of equipment would need to appear on the CTP's of each rack.

Meanwhile we racked the TX equipment (encoders, mux, IRD etc) into one of these racks in preparation. It got a bit fiddly in terms of leaving enough space so that everything could be cooled and so that each piece of equipment would be easily accessible from the back of the rack. In the end everything managed to fit and after plugging up and sorting out a few minor problems within the encoder configurations the rack was up and running again. 

 

Engineering - Musion

On Wednesday Emily (Sponsorship & Branding), Kat (Branding), David (Talent Showdown Producer), Dave and I went up to Regents Park to visit Musion.

Musion are the world leaders in 3D holographic projection systems and what we saw during their demonstration was fairly incredible, the basic idea is that an HD image is projected onto a transparent foil which makes it appear as if it were floating in mid air. The image can then be interacted with by a rehearsed presenter providing a very realistic holographic feel to the set-up.

The idea for Rave Live would be to to have this holographic set-up on the main stage and use it to present channel listings and student animations, along hosting the initial opening to the event. There was also another idea to provide some kind of live 'telepresence' (making a person appear as a hologram) for which we would need to provide the camera.

Dave and I went along to view this from a more technical perspective and as such we were looking at the real-time implications behind using Musion on the day, as such we came up with a list of pros and cons:

Pros:

• Looks really good when it is shot and filmed well

• They will provide the equipment to achieve this and also the man power to rig it up

• They will provide some help to us when filming and producing the content for this

• They can do it with a feed of HDSDI which we can achieve with a HDX900 from stores

• If we can include this in one of the shows as an insert then it will look really professional and engage the audience really well

Cons:

• It needs a lot of light for it to work and also it needs a light show to be effective

• The equipment that they will bring is heavy which will put some restrictions on our shows rigs due to weight

• It will take 6+ hours to rig which eats into a whole days rigging time, assuming that we cannot rig around them on the stage so this cuts the stages rig time by a day

• The screen is expensive and can be broken, with students on and off stage all the time there would be a possibility that it could get broken

• It works best with high contrast meaning there should be as little light off the stage as possible. With the venue being used as an exhibition as well there will be a lot of light spilling onto the stage

• We're not sure how this will fit into the schedule, with the shows on stage and the time needed for the turn around will there be time to show anything on this?

• We do not have the content yet, it seems a little bit too late to be making content now

Obviously a lot of these points require us liaising with representatives from Musion, especially the items concerning the actual rig. The idea is to start doing this as soon as management have decided how they wish to proceed and whether or not we will actually be using Musion.

Engineering - Talent Showdown

Last weekend we visited Coopers Technology College to give the producers of Talent Showdown a hand with the rig of their flyaway. Unfortunately we ran into a few technical hitches, notably due to a couple of unknown flaws in the rig of the sync. The initial system diagram (drawn by George Alton) can be seen below.

During the run up to the show there were minor flaws, mostly due to dodgy cable ends meaning that colour information kept being dropped in a couple of the camera outputs. Eventually we also realised that several of the cameras were losing their colour when they were run through the main programme bank of the vision mixer. After an hour or so of tweaking we couldn't find a solution and seeing as the preview outputs weren't losing their colour information we decided that it was something to do with the main programme bank. As a work around we then took the PVW output and ran this into a VDA and thus distributed it to the VTR's and the monitors.

Once the programme started we then ran into more problems, after the first five minutes a couple of the cameras kept dropping their sync during a cut from the vision mixer. This eventually got worse until they were not genlocking at all. The only feasible solution was to put tapes into all of the cameras and iso record them, all we had to do was sync up the timecode between the cameras to make it easier during the edit. We also recorded the camera that we were originally going to use as a back-up onto a VT Deck so that production would have plenty of options when it came to the final edit

After the shoot we realised that part of the reason that some of the cameras may have been losing their sync was because when shooting with composite video you have to be incredibly careful with timing, far more careful than we had been. Originally we ran the Black & Burst into a DA and distributed it across all of the equipment, what we apparently should have done is run a feed of BB into the vision mixer, then taking a separate assigned output of BB for each of the inputs and run these into the cameras, then taken the final BB o/p of the mixer into a DA and distributed that accordingly. We still need to verify that this is the case but at the moment that appears to be the thing that went wrong, however it doesn't explain why the timing was pretty much fine all morning!

At the end of the day we all managed to find a suitable work-around, it does mean that the post production team have a little more work to do and hopefully the footage doesn't turn out to be that bad.